The last day of the journey was spent at Metz, where the Emperor reviewed an army corps. Their entry into this town must have seemed strange indeed to their Majesties, accustomed as they are to smiling, shouting crowds. Here there was no welcome, no smile, not a single flag. The people who stood in the streets looked on idly, like spectators of a curious show, as the long procession of carriages with their outriders moved on, to the sound only of the rumble of their own wheels. Sometimes a lady remarked resentfully on the strange absence of enthusiasm. The names over the doors were French, the faces were French, there was an atmosphere of French hostility.
Under a little awning, in the burning sunshine, the Empress stood for two hours, smiling and bowing while the troops marched past. The Emperor was on his horse a little distance away, amidst a group of officers. On the roof of a neighbouring building were gathered together the only Germans in the town. Here was a flutter of white, a shouting of Hurrah! a movement of welcome and delight, a little lonely outpost of loyalty and patriotism. The people on the roof and one or two rather dirty little boys were the only spectators present. The beautiful town went on with its own affairs while the German soldiers marched and rode past.
It seemed something of an anomaly and a mistake that these stalwart brown young men, good-tempered and patient as all German soldiers appear to be, should be living in a kind of exile within their own Empire, cordially disliked by the people among whom their lot is cast, not for any personal reason, but solely as a heritage left to them by a dead-and-gone generation. None of them were born at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, but they have their share of its aftermath. The Prussian spirit is not conciliatory. It has a knack of letting the conquered drink to the dregs the cup of humiliation; its press is bombastic, and has none of the large-minded tolerance which would enable it to appreciate the acute sufferings of a proud, humiliated people.
About five years after the end of the Boer war, a German lady who was dining at court drew me aside after dinner.
“To-day,” she said, “I have been talking to a German gentleman who has been living in your Orange River Free State, or whatever you call it; and he tells me that the Boers are quite content now to be under your Government—they do not want to change back again.”
“Are they?” I said. “Is he quite sure?”
“Oh, quite, quite certain. He knows. He is a German. They know he is a German. They tell him the truth. He says they are absolutely satisfied. Now tell me: how do you manage it? And with so few soldiers, I am told—hardly any at all. How do you do it? In five years! And look at us in Elsass-Lothringen. We don’t know how to satisfy them. They will never be satisfied. We are always in fear of war. Tell us your secret.” She laid her hand on my arm and looked at me intently, as though she could surprise the secret out of me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said lamely. “You see we’ve had a lot of practice at governing, and made an awful lot of mistakes, and we’ve learned a little by our past mistakes; I suppose that is one reason. So we know what are the kind of things that people won’t stand. And we let them a good deal alone afterwards, and play cricket and football with them and things of that kind; and we let them vote the same as the rest of us, and—er—well, we don’t treat them any differently from the rest, as far as I can make out—just let them alone to conspire or do as they like—and then if they know they can, they don’t want to. See? And then our Tommies—our soldiers—are very good too; they’re not brought up to be so patriotic as yours—so, of course, it’s less galling: they’d just as soon chum up with the enemy afterwards as not. Yours are brought up to look on him rather as a criminal, aren’t they? Not the officers, of course, but the others. They are patronizingly kind and pitying, and no one likes that, do they? You don’t want conquered people to lose their self-respect. Well, I don’t know, I’m sure——”
“Cricket and football,” the lady murmured, “and not too patriotic, and a vote, and let them conspire if they want to, and the soldiers are ‘chummy.’ Ach! We cannot do that. It is a matter of national temperament, I suppose, but it is sad, very sad. Here in five years you pacify your enemy, and in forty years we have not begun to pacify ours: it is a constant fear—a constant terror—one expects every day to hear that war has broken out. And you will not tell us your secret. How do you learn to govern like this? No, it is impossible! It must be, as I said, national temperament.”
She sighed and cast her eyes upward and walked away looking troubled.